The Miraculous Plot of Leiter & Lott

by Jonathan Lowe

  Val smiled, tentatively. "Actually, I'm a KTAT producer. Valerie Lott. The weekend show and sometimes the news."

  The girl looked past her, bored at this revelation. "Oh God."

  "Something. . . wrong with that too?"

  "Oh, no. Nothing. I mean everything. I mean, like, what's right about it? Anything, honey?" Rikki looked back at her deliberately, and winked.

  Honey, Val thought. A cloyingly sweet substance that could slowly smother a person. Like love. She took in a slow breath, and then sighed. "No, you're right, it is just a job, really. Like selling used cars. Or paint." She pursed her lips in correction. "I mean varnish."

  Rikki squinted to focus on her. Intrigued, now. "I like you," she announced, suddenly.

  "What?"

  "I just decided." She snapped her fingers. "Sometimes it happens that way, ya know? Don't take much. Just a peek."

  Val decided to mimic the gesture by snapping her own fingers in front of her own face several times, as a test. "Just like that?"

  "Sure."

  "Nice to be able to make a decision that quickly," Val said. "With just a peek."

  "Anybody can do it. Go ahead, give it a try."

  "What if it's the wrong decision?"

  "Then ya learn from yer mistake."

  "What have you learned so far, Rikki?"

  Rikki laughed at the question. "Hey, all I know is that life is what ya make it. Or haven't ya tried that? Life, I mean."

  Momentarily taken aback, Val wondered aloud, "You're a Buddhist too?"

  Rikki touched a broken fingernail to the top button of her shirt. "Me? Hell, no. I'm a roller coaster girl. Why'd ya think that?"

  "Met a guy at the park was a Buddhist, is why. Sounded like something he would say."

  "Yeah? Well, what did you say?"

  "'Goodbye.'"

  Rikki's eyes narrowed. A pouting look shaped her lips.

  "Okay, I guess maybe I wanted something he had," Val confessed, "impossible as it was to admit at the time." She paused to reflect on her odd admission. "We connected in a way I never had before with a man. We even shared the same interests, trite as it is to say. Things I told him, I’d never told anybody else. But he just seemed so. . .I don’t know. He did tell me we always think it'll be better one day. Salvation, redemption. Whatever. Only nothing much really changes unless something big happens to us."

  "What, ya mean like. . . death?"

  Val chuckled at the irony. "Maybe so, Rikki." She stopped herself, finally. "By the way, did you know a girl named Sarah Collins?"

  Rikki rubbed at her temples briefly with the palms of both hands. She followed this with a pause long enough to soft boil an egg. "You knew Sarah?"

  Val sat opposite her, at the end of the table. Clenched one hand into a fist. Looked down at it. "Not really," she admitted. "But I saw her the night she died in that tunnel. She was waiting for something, or someone. And I'm wondering who."

  "Why do ya care?"

  "Maybe because no one else does."

  "Good answer!" Rikki lifted one arm, suddenly expecting to be high-fived. Val obliged belatedly, in surprise, but felt no sense of exhilaration at the act. "Not the answer I got from the other lady, for sure," Rikki added.

  "Other lady?"

  "Police lady."

  "Oh."

  "Did you talk to her too?"

  "No, I talked to a male detective named Trent. Pretty routine, though."

  "Ya mean like paperwork, just for the record?"

  Val snapped her fingers, and smiled.

  Rikki nodded in memory. "About Sarah? Like I told that cop, can't really say I knew her, either. Not much of a peek there. I mean, we shared a booth now and then over at the Grill at one or two in the morning, like after some show at the Rialto. Truth be told, though, no one really knew Sarah. Not even Sarah. She didn't talk much."

  "What did she talk about when she did speak?"

  "Death, mostly. Wrote poems about it. Never showed 'em to me, but she did read me one, once. A new one, something about a girl asking, just before she died, what she ever lived for. I told Sarah maybe the girl was never alive to begin with. That maybe the girl was her, too."

  "What did she say to that?"

  "Didn't say nothin' the rest of the night."

  "Or the next night?"

  "Wasn't a next night. Not for me and Sarah."

  "How long ago?"

  "Two weeks? No. Three. Time flies when yer having fun."

  "What kind of fun, do you mean?"

  Rikki squinted at her again. Another long pause. "You interviewing me now, or we, like, just talkin'?"

  Val looked down at her hands again, clenching and unclenching them experimentally. "Don't know what I'm doing anymore, tell the truth."

  Rikki brightened. "Talkin', then. That's good. Very good. People don't talk much anymore, ya know. Not really. Got their cell phones on all the time, a' course, but what do they really say? Stuff about cute boys see them as body parts instead a' people."

  Val looked over at her. "That's pretty. . ."

  "Cynical?"

  "I was going to say observant. For a girl your age, I mean."

  Rikki grinned. "Yeah, well, let a nice guy come along, and guess what? It's not an attractive trait. We all have a fascination with users who use us, don't we?"

  "Ain't that the truth."

  "Exact opposite of, like, common sense. So how observant is that?"

  Val shrugged. "Does sound like you know what you're doing, even as you do it."

  "Doesn't everybody?"

  "Obviously not me."

  "Humm," said Rikki, massaging her lower lip with her front teeth. Then she blinked and stared with her bright thespian eyes. "We're not that much different, are we? I mean, I could be you, and you could be me. Right?"

  "Think so?"

  "Why not come with us, an' see?"

  "With who?"

  Rikki pointed over her shoulder. Val turned to see a sky blue BMW convertible enter the alley from the other side, a young man at the wheel.

  "Who's he?" Val asked.

  "A cute guy," Rikki said. "A user."

  "Oh. One of those."

  "Thinks he's my boyfriend, but he's got a lot to learn."

  "Really."

  "Oh yeah. Got a friend who likes older women, too."

  "Like me?"

  "You bet. But all the same, I think maybe you could teach him a thing or three."

  "No, I don't think so."

  "Why not? Hey, it's really no big deal."

  "Some other time, then."

  "No time like the present."

  "I've heard that before, too."

  ~ * ~

  In her midtown apartment that evening, Val made herself a yogurt salad, then sat on the couch to sip hot chocolate while she watched a reality show featuring wannabe real estate moguls being judged by a maniacal bubble-bursting matriarch. She tried to concentrate on the inane situation developing on screen, but found her mind wandering back instead to her conversation in the park, and the abrupt way she'd impulsively ended it. Even before the show was over, she curtailed both trains of thought, and went to bed. But sleep did not come easily. When it did, she discovered herself in another kind of show altogether.

  At first, in her dream, she was riding in the back seat of the blue BMW convertible, cruising University Avenue with a leering 20 year old whose eyes possessed the red glint seen in bad flash photos. The night felt as unreal as the set of a video game, as she seemed to drift along in a charmed daze, transfixed by the young man's frozen gaze. A long low rumble, an octave below the threshold of recognition, accompanied their car, which moved through traffic as though propelled by force of will. Other convertibles swept past them like images seen in playback mode. When at last they dipped into a tunnel, down under a series of bridges, the world lost all color completely, and time slowed. She was aware of being touched, then, and of being felt without feeling. Aware of the moon now drifting overhead, eclipsed by bridges before
emerging again.

  Shadows circled around her, now, the young man's face one of the circles. His grin was a half moon in the darkness, and then pale in the sweeping light again. Behind him and out of focus, Val glimpsed a figure in passing. Someone pressed against a pillar floated by like an anomaly in the cryptic procession of the concrete obelisks. At this, she tried to shout, but couldn't. Her throat was dry, her mouth clamped shut by a hand.

  The hand of the young man with the glassy eyes.

  She shut her own eyes next, and the world went completely black. When she became aware again, still in her dream, she realized that they had abandoned her at the park. The changing nightmare had somehow mutated into a bizarre film noir featuring long shadows and a pervasive feeling of dread and loss. Now she seemed to roam through this nightmare landscape anxiously, in search of someone who might already be dead and gone. She didn't know the name of the person she sought, so she couldn't call it out. Oddly, and most disturbing of all, she couldn't remember her own name, or where she lived.

  Her disorientation soon became palpable, her anxiety acute. Distant lights of dream houses seemed to glow from across the street. She could see adobe walls and high fences made of interlocking ocotillo branches, but felt only repulsion from the security light's glare. With a force like the polarity of a reversed magnet, when she found that she couldn't cross out of the park, she circled back into the shadows instead, and began to run across the spongy grass, attempting to cry out--

  Hello! Anyone here?

  Yet she could still make no sound. There was no answer, either, except from an intermittent breeze high in the trees. From her footfalls in the grass. When her sense of bewilderment reached an unbearable crescendo, she stopped running and stood alone to face whatever it was.

  What would happen next?

  Nothing yet, an anonymous voice seemed to answer.

  It wasn't the voice inside her head this time--berating her, or pretending to protect her. This was another entity, from beyond her. Or from so far inside that she'd never heard it as distinctly.

  A gentle voice. A knowing voice.

  Who are you? she asked wordlessly, not even moving her lips. Where are you?

  When no reply came, she looked up at the tree beside her. A tree she knew that she only imagined. But here it was, all the same. Tall and true and big as life. Did a falling tree make a sound if no one was there to hear it? Was she here to test that?

  Instinctively, she lifted her arms, half hoping the tree might fall by force of will, and finally awaken her. Or end her. Instead, to her surprise, what fell was only a solitary fluttering leaf on a dry, brown stem. A leaf that twirled its way to the ground beside her foot. The tree itself seemed rooted in silence, growing to the sky, its language written in shadow and stone. To decipher either its nature or its meaning seemed impossible. Perhaps no one could do it--not even the man with no name.

  ~ * ~

  When she woke, it was still dark. Her legs were pulled up, knees high, as if she’d been trying to run in her sleep. She lay, contemplating this trick her mind had been playing on her. She imagined what a psychiatrist might say about it, and perhaps be right. Was she just going through a withdrawal phase from her boyfriend?

  David.

  She thought the name, now, and her ex's face materialized in her mind, like a search engine opening a jpeg. The face seemed almost a stranger’s to her, though, lingering against her revulsion until she yielded to the urge to wipe it aside, as in a slide show, letting the image be replaced by the face of the man she'd only called David.

  She gazed at this new face jealously, holding onto it lest it disappear, until a new thought arose inside her: Did she now secretly imagine that someone who appeared to be on the edge of homelessness could be Mr. Right?

  She slapped the wall behind her with an open palm, willing all the images in her head to go away. A woman--any woman--could drive herself into neurosis by listening to the wrong people. Even if those people were different than all the men who'd lied to her in the past by promising the future. Even if they were not liars at all, they all still lied about something. If only to themselves. Besides this, she told herself, if either of her two Davids had really been the one, would they have let her walk away without so much as another word?

  If you want someone to return, you let them go.

  “Shut up!” she yelled impulsively, and then with emphatic finality slapped the wall behind her again.

  “No,” a fainter voice responded from the next apartment, “you shut up!”

  8

  Upon returning to work, Val didn’t have to go looking for Greg Lomax. Her boss was waiting for her right outside her office. The knot of Greg's striped red tie was pulled down three inches below his open collar, so that his usual weary expression complemented a disheveled appearance. Either he'd been running a hand repeatedly through his thinning hair, or he'd somehow strayed into the path of jet engine exhaust.

  “I was just about to call you,” Greg told her ominously, as he closed the glass door behind them.

  “Really? Good. Because I wanted to talk to you too, actually.” She watched in curiosity as Greg glanced around the small space for a second chair in which to sit. Finding none, he opted to take hers. This left Val standing in front of her own desk like a recalcitrant high school student.

  Elbows planted amid the clutter of her desk, Greg now tented his hands in front of him, tapping them lightly. Waiting. “You first,” he said.

  “Okay,” she began, “although I think you need a vacation too, from the looks of you. It’s more than that for me, though, really. I don’t know how to explain it. Time off, or time out?”

  “This isn’t a game,” Greg said.

  “No, you’re right. I’m not sure what it is anymore, to tell the truth. Personally, I'll admit I've lost focus on certain things, but I think that’s because--”

  Greg waved a hand at her to stop, pointing at his watch like a referee.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “You don’t know?”

  She shook her head. “No. Tell me.”

  “There’s been a kidnapping,” Greg announced. “Happened at Reid park yesterday.”

  "What?”

  “Melissa Melendez, six year of daughter of a city council member, abducted from a school group when she wandered a little too far away. Somebody snatched her around three o’clock. Around the same time you were there, correct?”

  Blindsided by the news, Val froze in disconcertion, then tried to concentrate before muttering, “Yes, but it was more like two o’clock when I saw a group of kids there. So it couldn’t have been the same group. Couldn’t have been.”

  “And why is that?”

  “Because they were just leaving, as I recall it.” She looked up at an expanse of white fiberboard ceiling tiles, trying to visualize her memory of yellow school bus and tidy line of youngsters, in order to confirm it somehow. “Yes, I’m sure of it. It must have been a later group than the one I saw. Those school groups come and go all the time, don’t they?”

  Greg’s head bobbed, tentatively. “I suppose.”

  “What’s this all about?” she asked, motioning with one empty palm toward him in appeal. Getting no answer other than a pained look, she added, “Has there been a ransom demand?"

  “Not yet, but it’s probably coming. By the way, how did it go with Vasquez?”

  “Vasquez?” she said, narrowing her eyes in confusion. “I. . . didn’t see him.”

  Greg nodded again. “So I heard.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “The team’s management said they never talked to you, Val, although a couple rookie players saw someone fits your description. Were you going to tell me what happened with that?”

  “What do you mean?”

  Greg gazed at her steadily, now, the trace of a disappointed and humorless smile curling one side of his lips.

  “Okay,” she confessed, hands straightening her blouse, “so I got distracte
d. Why does that matter?”

  “Why does it matter? Because Claire Robinson just brought up your name to me in discussing cutbacks in personnel, and you don't want her looking in your direction, Val. That's why. What were you distracted by, anyway?”

  She huffed disbelief. “A conversation with someone. Okay? I’m sorry.”

  “Oh, now you’re sorry,” Greg confirmed, nodding factitiously. “Who was the guy? Or is that a secret?”

  “Why are you asking me that?”

  “It’s not me. It’s the police who want to know. It's why they just called here, asking about you.”

  “About me?”

  “That's what I said.”

  Greg produced a slip of paper, like a magic trick, and held it up to her. She snatched it from between his fingers. On the slip a name and number had been scribbled. Val stared in confusion at the name of the same detective she'd talked to on the phone the previous morning. Detective Martin Trent, it read.

  “Why does he want to talk to me about this?” she asked.

  “Well,” Greg replied, “it’s probably because a teacher at the park recognized you from television, too, and claims she saw you talking to a homeless man on a park bench only an hour before little Melissa Melendez got snatched by a man who just might fit the same description.” Greg paused, letting that sink in. “The actual eyewitness to the abduction is with a sketch artist now. What they want from me in the meantime is your guy's name. Just to, you know, rule him out?”

  She nodded slowly, as it dawned. “I see.”

  “Great. What’s his name, Val? Or would you prefer Claire asking you that question?”

  “Name? I. . . I don’t know.”

  “You. . . don’t know,” Greg repeated.

  “I’ll tell you what I do know, though. It wasn’t him, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “Who?”

  “David.”

  “His name is David, now?”

  “No, that's my boyfriend. I mean ex boyfriend. I called him David because he. . . well, he wouldn't tell me his name.”

  Greg visibly twitched, then stared at the floor.

  “No, no, no,” she added, smiling nervously. “You don't understand. This guy, he's. . . I’m not sure how to describe him. Kind, gentle. And he's not homeless, either. He just helps homeless people.”